To explore the boundaries between artwork and audience, Gimhongsok created a series of sculptural performances in which a person wearing an animal costume poses in the gallery. Bunny’s Sofa is a continuation of this series, but with a different twist. Instead of hiring a real person to dress as the animal, Gimhongsok placed a mannequin inside the rabbit costume. When exhibiting the work, the artist produces a false statement claiming that he has paid an illegal worker from North Korea to wear the suit and to maintain a lounging posture for a certain length of time. But both the performer and the financial transaction existed only in the text, truths concealed by the costume and social propriety. By interchanging physical realities and contexts and obscuring details, Gimhongsok challenges the effectiveness of visual and textual communication to create a potential moral anxiety in the viewers.
Raising questions about South Korea’s position in the world beyond its own social and political borders, Seoul-based artist Gimhongsok investigates communication, language, and popular culture. Gimhongsok’s ideas and deadpan satirical humor manifest themselves in many media and, because his creative process and personal style remain enigmatic, he is considered to be a “mysterious genius” in his homeland. Whether overt or implicit in their message, Gimhongsok’s spectacular works juxtapose image and language to lure viewers into a labyrinthine journey towards ever-elusive meaning.
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
A steel clothing rack adorned with turbine vents, Moroccan vintage jewelry, pinecones and knitting yarn, these heterogeneous elements are used here to create an exotic yet undefined identity within the work...
In the six-minute single-channel video Higher Horse , Kate Gilmore perches herself on top of a tall pile of plaster blocks, in front of a pink colored wall with vein-like streaks of red...
Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors...
Malani draws upon her personal experience of the violent legacy of colonialism and de-colonization in India in this personal narrative that was shown as a colossal six channel video installation at dOCUMENTA (13), but is here adapted to single channel...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
In addition to Yang’s signature drying rack and light bulbs, Office Voodoo includes various office supplies like CDs, paper clips, headphones, a computer mouse, a stamp, a hole puncher, a mobile phone charger...
Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city...
Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...
The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...
The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel...
Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct...
Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook...
Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...
Gypsy shows an ambivalent scene, in which broken blinds and its unsmiling subject are balanced with the stilllife plentitude of watermelon slices and the beautifully lit nudity of the sitter...